Cinema Paradiso

Kim's Video once represented everything that I loved about New York - its diversity, its culture (both high and low), its ability to accommodate (and thus encourage) all sorts of interests.  It was the first video store I knew of to organize their titles by director, and their library seemed vast and overwhelming, but in the most pleasurable way.  

It seems that Kim's has fallen prey to the Netflix phenomenon (our own Videorama itself just closed for good on Friday), so it's had to close, but there's an interesting twist to the story.  According to the NY Times, Kim himself offered to donate the entire collection to someone who could:  "Keep the collection intact, continue to update it and make it accessible to Kim’s members and others." 

So where is the Kim's collection ending up?  In a small town in Italy called Salemi, where "an art critic and onetime anarchist" is mayor, a Benetto photographer is the "alderman of creativity", a prince was put in charge of town planning, and a "performance artist was officially declared alderman to nothing."  Follow the NY Times link above to read this crazy story.